Intel Core i7-8700K And Core i5-8400 Review: Coffee Lake - More Cores, Performance And Value

For our next series of tests with Coffee Lake, we moved on to some game-related metrics with 3DMark, specifically the physics benchmark that's part of the Fire Strike test, along with a couple of actual games. For the 3DMark Physics test, we simply create a custom 3DMark run consisting solely of the physics test, which is CPU dependent, and report the results...

Gaming: 3DMark Physics Taking the GPU out of the Equation

3DMark's built-in CPU Physics test has the Core i7-8700K falling victim to only the ultra-high-end Core i9-7900X. The 8700K, however, was faster than all of the 8-core Ryzen processors here. The Core i5-8400 outruns the quad-core Ryzen 5 1500X, but doesn't come close to the 6-core / 12-thread Ryzen 5 1600X.

High Resolution Gaming Tests 1080P and 4K Gaming With GeForce GTX 1080

We also ran some high-resolution game and graphics tests on Intel's latest processors using 3DMark, Hitman, and Ashes Of The Singularity. We used 3DMark's Fire Strike Ultra preset, and both of the games were run with all in-game graphics options set to their maximum values, save for the Ashes 1080P test where we used the "High" preset. Note, we also swapped out the GTX 960 for a more powerful GeForce GTX 1080 here.

The 3DMark Fire Strike results are tightly grouped, because the tests are mostly GPU limited, but once again the Core i7-8700K pull off a first-place finish.

The Core i7-8700K continued its winning ways in the Hitman benchmark as well -- at both resolutions -- even managing to outpace the ultra-high-end Intel processors. Though the Core i7-8700K doesn't have near the number of cores of the 7900X, its 12-threads are still plenty here and its higher clocks give it an edge.

There are a lot of results to digest in the Ashes benchmark. The Core i7-8700K wasn't the fastest of the bunch in every test, but in the "All Batches" test it did take the top spot at 1080P. The Core i7-8700K drops down a couple of rungs at 4K, but remains tightly grouped with the other high-end processors.
 

We're not going to dwell much on graphics performance with the 8th Generation Core series' on-processor graphics, because they're essentially the same as the previous generation. Support for faster memory, however, does give things a small boost here, as evidenced by the Core i7-7700K vs. Core i7-8700K comparison.